How to Market Your Janitorial Business

Read Time10 minutes

PublishedDecember 20, 2022

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Getting caught up in marketing hype is easy when you’re trying to land more jobs. Effective marketing for a cleaning business is vital to generating new revenue. Still, if you over-invest time and effort, it can end up feeling like you’re running a marketing firm that does janitorial work on the side.

You don’t need a massive budget, complicated strategies, and a huge time investment to generate new leads. These six cleaning business marketing ideas focus on low-budget and free steps to take that will deliver a long-term impact on landing more jobs.

Market your cleaning business like a pro

Understand your target market
Start with a plan for marketing a janitorial business
Publish and maintain a website with search engine optimization
Put business pages on social media
Differentiate yourself from the competition
Use paid digital advertising
Schedule email marketing campaigns

Understanding your target market

Before building buzz for your brand, you must identify who it is you want your marketing to reach and convert.

Market research is the first step to building an effective advertising plan that maximizes the return on your effort.

Some initial questions to help you identify your ideal customer:

Age, gender, salary, and professional title
Where they spend time online
Why they’re looking for a janitorial service
Their main concerns for the property
How do they communicate? Email, phone call, text, etc.

The more specific your customer profile, the more you can pinpoint your advertising to reach them and refine your strategy for marketing a janitorial business.

Who is the target audience for commercial cleaning services?

When gathering insights into how to promote your cleaning business, consider the three main market sectors:

Brand new commercial properties and facilities that are establishing their cleaning and maintenance processes for the first time.
Commercial clients who currently have a janitorial service company and are either:
Satisfied with their current service OR
Unhappy and looking to switch providers
Commercial properties with in-house janitorial and cleaning teams they’re looking to replace or augment.

Relationship-building is essential in lead generation because it gives your sales team insight into the circumstances of your prospects.

Across the industry, replacing another janitorial company makes up over 80 percent of new business. As you get to know your audience, you’ll be able to structure your cleaning marketing plan to their unique concerns and your services to meet their individual needs.

Create a marketing plan for your janitorial business

There should be two components of your plan. The first is intuitive: to get and keep clients. The second step is to find and retain employees to meet the new demand.

Write down your plan for marketing your cleaning business. It doesn’t have to look professional or complicated but is a document to review in the coming months and years to evaluate effective strategies and those that didn’t deliver a significant ROI.

Some recommended components of marketing a janitorial business:

Develop a niche. Highlight one aspect of your business that sets you apart from the competition, whether it’s your cleaning products, ownership, hours of service, or specialty services.
Position yourself as an industry leader. Use your marketing channels to demonstrate your expertise in janitorial services, whether it’s your knowledge of equipment, products, or technique.
Prioritize marketing channels. Even “free” advertising opportunities require a time investment. Don’t try to market everywhere all at once. Instead, select a few platforms to start and expand or restrict your marketing efforts as needed.
Set goals and timelines for achieving them. Defined milestones with definite due dates are essential for personal accountability and aligning expectations with results.

As you put a plan into motion, launch a similar strategy for finding high-quality employees. Your team members are the face of your brand–who your customers see in their facilities and buildings.

Finding and retaining great employees who deliver on the promise of your advertising is as crucial to marketing your business as any other channel.

Create and optimize your website for your cleaning business

You probably encountered digital marketing as soon as you researched how to market a cleaning business.

The hype is true—a digital marketing strategy for a cleaning business is essential to stay competitive. And the foundation of any online marketing is a website with the following:

Current contact information, including business name, phone number, and email address
A quote request form
Search-engine-optimized content to capture organic traffic
Testimonials and links to positive reviews
Pictures and videos of recent work
A blog sharing cleaning and maintenance tips

Your online presence can increase trust in your brand offline. Becoming Google Guaranteed earns your company a check badge in Google search results, and the search engine guarantees your services.

The guarantee process involves screening and verification, but when your business appears in search results alongside competitors, the green check badge from Google gives potential customers confidence in your brand.

Great marketing strategies don’t just focus on generating leads. They also reinforce your relationship with your existing clients.

The benefits of social media for marketing a cleaning business are well worth the time spent generating content.

→ You build brand awareness, and clever content marketing can capture organic traffic from followers' feeds.

→ Drives engagement with current customers and gets candid feedback with surveys and questions.

→ Generate interest in a referral program by asking users to share posts and follow your pages on other platforms.

Position yourself as a leader in the industry by creating informative, relevant posts and highlighting your entire range of commercial cleaning services. You can also generate interest in your email newsletter through social media.

Once you’ve developed your audience, you can choose which platforms to incorporate into your digital marketing strategy:

Facebook and Instagram
LinkedIn
Nextdoor
Twitter
TikTok

Ask followers to share your content with their private Facebook groups, which can generate leads from prospects to which you may not otherwise have access.

Stand out from the competition

The brand is at the heart of any campaign marketing janitorial services, which ultimately motivates an audience to choose one cleaning company over another.

Defining and refining your brand should be an everyday part of your operations.

Your brand is how you present yourself to your customers and prospects. In your logo, uniform, and company vehicles, as well as:

How you deliver professionalism in every interaction and job
Guaranteeing high-quality services
The accessibility you offer through convenient and prompt communication

Simply delivering good service at a low price isn’t enough to hold onto your customers, let alone win prospects from other service providers.

What do customers want from a cleaning company?

Customer experience is king when it comes to securing brand loyalty. In fact, many consumers are willing to pay more—up to 16 percent—for excellent customer experiences.

What does that figure mean when deciding how to promote your cleaning business? Set yourself apart from the competition by providing the following:

Efficiency: from providing a quote to executing service, streamline everything you do to save your customers time and disruption.
Convenience: flexible scheduling, multiple communication channels, and online customer portals make your services accessible to customers.
Easy payment: link to your online payment portal right from invoices and accept credit card and ACH payments.
Friendly, knowledgeable service: see every person you hire as a reflection of your brand who will deliver outstanding customer experiences at every job.

Using janitorial business software like Aspire integrates convenience for your customers with efficiency and end-to-end functionality for your business. You can do everything from estimates to scheduling, job management, and invoicing from a single platform.

Promote with paid advertisements

While you don’t need a huge marketing budget, paid digital advertising offers a reliable ROI and is a great way to reach your target audience.

→ Geo-fencing: The way people consume media has changed in recent years. You can use location-based advertising to reach your target market on mobile devices in a specific neighborhood at certain times of day and on specific channels such as Instagram and Facebook, Google, or streaming platforms.

→ Google Ads: Ensure your company comes up at the top of the results page—before even SEO results—for keywords related to your services with pay-per-click search engine ads. Once your commercial cleaning business page is set up on Google, your company will also appear when customers search for janitorial services near them.

→ Facebook Ads: Create both posts and short videos to advertise on Facebook. The social media platform enables advertisers to specify audience demographics, ensuring your content gets in front of the people it needs to reach.

Set a budget for your paid advertising and track the ROI across different platforms. Honing the marketing strategy for a cleaning business gets easier as business owners learn where prospects engage with content.

Develop an email marketing strategy

Email marketing provides one of the highest returns on investment across all media–digital and print—as much as a $36 return on every $1 spent. No advertising plan is complete without incorporating an email newsletter.

A newsletter sign-up on your website is an easy way for small businesses to generate leads. It’s crucial to minimize un-subscribers to make the most of this marketing channel.

→ Don’t spam newsletter recipients into unsubscribing–usually, sending one email a month is a good schedule.

→ Keep content true to your brand, with engaging content subscribers will want to read and apply to their buildings and facilities.

→ Include a call to action in the newsletter to drive interest to your referral program, social media pages, or online review sites such as Yelp.

Email newsletters help cleaning business owners build relationships with new clients and their existing customer base. They’re also an opportunity to pitch new services, verticals, or locations before committing capital to expand.

How to market a janitorial business with email

Email marketing has an incredibly robust ROI because leads have to provide their email address to sign up. Encourage new subscribers to join by offering discounted services for newsletter sign-up and seasonal specials for newsletter members.

You can also use email to launch re-engagement campaigns with inactive customers and cold leads.

A well-executed email marketing strategy will generate new business and build trust in your brand. It can also support a word-of-mouth marketing strategy if customers forward your content to their network.

Network with local businesses

Networking is one of the most involved marketing strategies, but it provides businesses with the community and structure to set ambitious goals for the future.

→ Approach your network by asking how you can benefit others.

You’ll reinforce your position as a leader in the service business industry and resource to connect customers with services, even if you’re not the one providing them.

→ Don’t limit your network to just potential clients.

A robust network includes building relationships with future customers but also:

Suppliers and vendors
Real estate professionals
Competitors
Residential cleaning companies

By staying engaged and interested in your network, you’ll not only build foundations for securing large contracts in the future but may also find partners, M&A opportunities, and new verticals.

→ Bring printed marketing materials wherever you go.

Attractive business cards with QR codes carry your brand into the world and reinforce word-of-mouth advertising by enabling people to pass your information to those needing your services. Always leave a few business cards behind, whether at chamber of commerce networking events and seminars or business meetings.

How do I get office cleaning clients?

You don’t want to feel like you must teach marketing principles while also running a growing janitorial business. At the most basic level, doing great work and focusing on customers as people–not potential revenue–will go a long way to creating momentum for growth.

You may not be ready to scale at the moment, but it’s critical to continue to practice these steps even when your schedule is packed. Marketing impacts engagement with your current clients builds brand loyalty, and generates relationship-based leads which deliver contracts with higher LTV.

Aspire’s cloud-based janitorial management software establishes consistent organizational processes, enabling leadership to work on the business instead of in the industry.

Schedule a demonstration with Aspire to see what’s possible when you implement a structure for limitless growth.

FAQs

Why is marketing for a janitorial business important?

Marketing is the vehicle for bringing your brand to new customers and increasing revenue.

Janitorial is an almost $100 billion industry, growing over 6 percent per year. There are a lot of brands, each with a unique niche and a drive to set themselves apart from the competition.

Advertising lets you–not your competitors–determine your market share. It also helps you to define the kinds of customers you want, the benefits you can provide them, and your values as an organization.

There’s no limit to the amount a company can scale with a comprehensive approach to marketing janitorial services.

How much does marketing for a janitorial business typically cost?

There are two ways to think about your marketing budget. As a general rule, to maintain your current business size, plan on spending 7 to 8 percent of your yearly budget.

If you’re entering a growth cycle and want to attract new customers, you may need to allocate as much as 20 percent of your budget to advertising.

When first starting in the commercial cleaning industry, it can be hard to allocate a substantial portion of your budget to marketing. But advertising is an investment in growing your business. It’s crucial to:

Make a budget and stick to it.
Track your ROI for every marking channel.
Be willing to change what isn’t working.

You can make responsive decisions about marketing costs for your cleaning business by tracking metrics such as lead generation across active channels.

How does Aspire assist janitorial companies with business management?

Marketing is just one strategy for growing your annual revenue through new customers. Business management software streamlines operations and eliminates errors and inefficiencies to release new profit from your existing bottom line.

By eliminating siloed operations across your organization, you build the systems and processes that will support monster growth in the future. Aspire’s end-to-end functionality delivers: